#Polycentricity
Polycentricity of potato regulation has been _the_ reality for at least a decade.
www.aspistrategist.org.au/states-vulne...
March 3, 2025 at 9:23 AM
“Complexity is not the same as chaos”. There’s a nice chapter from Alice Calder in here that unpacks Ostrom’s idea of polycentricity.

Public officials often think they need to tidy up institutions that seem messy - overlapping remits, etc. 1/2
November 16, 2024 at 8:28 PM
"It is concluded that NICE is largely characterised by neoliberal corporate bias, though some elements of its organisation are also consistent with theories of capture, pluralism and polycentricity."
Many dedicated people work for NICE. 💙Yet, a reminder about the organisational culture risks.
January 14, 2025 at 7:51 PM
I'm hoping the polycentricity the underlying protocol enables helps to keep things this way by letting the overall network grow, while allowing for (overlapping) small town vibes to persist.
May 7, 2023 at 10:53 PM
Think you are misinterpreting that figure as DIST is not to the CBD but to one of several nodes, as the paper explicitly notes because of polycentricity.
December 21, 2024 at 4:29 AM
Appreciate your analysis - well done!
I think Ostrom's 8th principle, nested enterprises and polycentricity, is also critical to overcoming the challenges of global commons. Your example of smallpox eradication illustrated this.
August 7, 2024 at 1:04 PM
regions: high-income countries exhibit greater polycentricity than low-income countries, demonstrating a positive correlation between urban sprawl and economic growth. Our global dataset and findings provide critical insights into urban structure and [6/7 of https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06445v1]
March 11, 2025 at 6:34 AM
Borderline, but more likely substantive I think. There’s a bit in his 2022 CLJ article about the substantive requirements being those which makes it more difficult for MPs to apply their own judgement - you could argue this isn’t met here, but I think it misses the polycentricity of a lot of Bills.
March 25, 2025 at 5:34 PM
3 cures to monomania
1. Broad + deep, high quality education focused on logic, consequential thinking, civics, humanities, arts & science (especially entropy & the 2nd law of thermodynamics)
2. Diversity. Diversified thinking, diverse teams, diverse communities
3. Polycentricity cont. 5 /
April 8, 2025 at 11:14 PM
Emphasis on polycentricity looks encouraging in this lecture tomorow at @BartlettUCL www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/pla...
Reinvigorating the Suburbs: Championing Diversity, Density and more Dynamic Lifestyles
Join Dan Ringelstein in our second instalment of our Bartlett School of Planning Public Lecture Series.
www.ucl.ac.uk
November 20, 2024 at 9:22 AM
Disagree. Polycentricity is a general emergency phenomenon of transportation and urban economics. We see more of it with cars because cars/car mandates make the costs of higher density prohibitive until much higher land values.
November 27, 2024 at 2:02 PM
@robin

Polycentricity is not the same as democracy.

Pushing the governance at the "local" level , to multiple actors disregards the fact that the design of the common medium, the infrastructure, has its own complex dynamics, that it requires democratic governance.

There is no such thing as a […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
June 5, 2025 at 6:37 PM
The power of a theory is exactly proportionate to the diversity of situations it can explain. | Elinor Ostrom

https://stoweboyd.com/post/757753520/elinor-ostrom-and-polycentricity
Medium
stoweboyd.com
December 2, 2024 at 6:37 PM
Agreed on all points. The fact that we're in a weird transition means that we have greater agency to shape things. We need to be deliberate about it.

And building with assumptions of polycentricity, including to nondigital things, is part of that!
July 2, 2023 at 10:34 PM
Okay, but then all the Rhine-Ruhr urban cores with Stadtbahns have very high rail usage per capita - the region's weaker rail usage is in the suburbs and a lot of that is polycentricity favoring cars plus a weaker S-Bahn network.
April 8, 2025 at 1:21 PM
That's fair (and too empirical for me to be too skeptical). My intuition is that sprawly polycentricity should have higher network utilization of the expressways compared to current peak-direction travel (and hence less congestion). OTOH, Bertaud might point out that even LA has a density gradient.
November 26, 2024 at 3:50 PM
The issue here gets back to polycentricity: each of the three faculties—rational, emotional and desiring—has to be capable of being understood in a totalizing sense, or else we don't feel the force of Socrates' argument for the rational.
January 25, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Actus Mer/Sea News: Polycentricity and Regional Ocean Governance: Implications for the Emerging UN Agreement on Marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction - @FrontMarineSci http://dlvr.it/S6M8dQ
January 29, 2025 at 11:53 AM
I liked the section on how someone living a life linked with a God who is not their Leader-God can be seen as an offering of your Leader-God to that God, one divine individual recognising another divine individual.

It shows the Polycentricity and multiplicity starts with the Gods.
January 28, 2025 at 7:42 PM
doi.org/10.1017/S174... I knew Lin and Vincent but never put it together that their work on the commons and polycentricity was deeply influenced by cybernetics and Ashby's ideas about requisite variety.
The Ostroms on self-governance: the importance of cybernetics | Journal of Institutional Economics | Cambridge Core
The Ostroms on self-governance: the importance of cybernetics - Volume 20
doi.org
September 30, 2024 at 3:33 PM
Bluesky academics, lets get to know each other! Quote this & tell me: 1) a project you are working on & 2) an odd idea/theory you aren’t working on but keep thinking about

1) Collective action and polycentricity in the Sanctuary movement.
2) Economics of inequality for relational egalitarians.
November 18, 2024 at 3:27 PM
Last week, the IGRI Directorate attended the 20th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons! Learn more:

2025.iasc-commons.org/abstract_aut...
2025.iasc-commons.org/abstract_aut...
2025.iasc-commons.org/abstract_aut...

#conference #institutionalgrammar
June 24, 2025 at 8:20 PM
To what extent do network and agglomeration externalities explain productivity in Chinese urban regions? This study explores how polycentricity and externalities impact regional economic outcomes. 1/5
November 4, 2024 at 8:18 AM
NEW PAPER - A big data approach to modelling urban population density functions: from monocentricity to polycentricity, by Cehong Luo, Yujie Hu, and Fahui Wang www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
March 3, 2025 at 4:16 PM